Streaming poses ultimate Catch-22

Barry Diller’s new Aereo venture may turn out to be the ultimate Catch-22. Aereo is possible only because of the existence of broadcast television, but broadcasters view it as a threat and have warned that they may stop broadcasting. If that happens, broadcast television and Aereo could both cease to exist.

Unlike the iconic fictional Catch-22, however, this outcome would yield benefits to society: Hastening the demise of broadcast television would accelerate the transfer of spectrum to higher-value uses.

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Only a small fraction of TV viewers — about 10 percent — still rely on over-the-air broadcasts to receive their programs; the remaining 90 percent view their programs through subscription TV services like local cable or satellite transmissions.

The current over-the-air broadcasters occupy a large block of spectrum that would most likely be more valuable if converted to mobile broadband use. The effective supply of spectrum for such mobile broadband uses hasn’t expanded sufficiently to keep up with the exploding demand, contributing to a growing and widely acknowledged scarcity problem.

Using this spectrum for over-the-air broadcasting probably made good sense 50 years ago, when almost all viewers used their own antennas. Cable systems were rare and existed solely for households in remote rural regions where over-the-air signals were weak or nonexistent. And cellphones were still an experimental toy at the Bell Labs.